The most dangerous forms of cancer comprise malignant cells that metastasize to distant sites in a body. Metastatic cells have the property of being able to break away from a primary tumor, translocate to distant sites, and colonize distant and foreign microenvironments. Cancer cell metastasis requires cellular capacity to 1) detach from a primary tumor, 2) migrate and invade through local tissues, 3) translocate to distant sites in the body (via lymph or blood), 4) colonize a foreign site, and 5) grow and survive in this foreign environment. All of these behaviors are linked to cell adhesions.
Cell adhesions control the physical interactions of cells with their microenvironment. Cell adhesions also initiate signals that dictate tumor cell growth, death, and differentiation. At the cellular level, metastatic cells have overcome restraints upon cell growth and migration that result from physical linkages and signals conveyed by cell-cell contacts. Malignant cells often have increased interactions with surrounding extracellular matrix (ECM) proteins that provide linkages and signals that promote several aspects of metastasis.
Protein tyrosine phosphorylation is believed to regulate a balance between cell-cell and cell-ECM adhesions in epithelial cells. Elevated tyrosine kinase activity weakens cell-cell contacts and promotes ECM adhesions. Alteration in levels of tyrosine phosphorylation is believed to be important for tumor cell invasiveness. Tyrosine phosphorylation is controlled by cell membrane tyrosine kinases, and increased expression of tyrosine kinases is known to occur in metastatic cancer cells. It is therefore desirable to have compounds that selectively inhibit tyrosine kinases, particularly those tyrosine kinases that are involved in malignant cell growth.
A general approach to designing inhibitors that are selective for a given protein is to determine how a putative inhibitor interacts with a three dimensional structure of that protein. For this reason it is useful to obtain the protein in crystalline form and perform X-ray diffraction techniques to determine the protein's three dimensional structure coordinates. Various methods for preparing crystalline proteins are known in the art.
Once protein crystals are produced, crystallographic data can be generated using the crystals to provide useful structural information that assists the design of small molecules that bind to the active site of the protein and inhibit the protein's activity in vivo. If the protein is crystallized as a complex with a ligand, one can determine both the shape of the protein's binding pocket when bound to the ligand, as well as the amino acid residues that are capable of close contact with the ligand. By knowing the shape and amino acid residues in the binding pocket, one may design new ligands that will interact favorably with the protein. With such structural information, available computational methods may be used to predict how strong the ligand binding interaction will be. Such methods help in the design of inhibitors that bind strongly, as well as selectively to the protein.